Divination
by StarsAboveInMyEyes
Summary: Two days before the Third Task, Harry and Ron have one last boring Divination lesson before their world turns on its head.


"Harry! Harry, wake up."

Chinks of light pierced Harry's vision of darkness as he awoke, groggily rubbing his eyes behind his glasses. Ron was shaking his arm and nudging him gently while Harry tried to remember where he was. He was sitting on a low pouffe in a dimly lit room with his head resting in his arms, which were folded comfortably on a small round table covered by a cherry red embroidered tablecloth.

"Wha- oh," he realised, catching sight of the hazy, fog-filled, glass orb in front of him. He was in the Divination classroom. "Crap," Harry murmured upon finding that half the class were staring curiously at him. He remembered looking dazedly into the sherry scented fireplace and doodling on some parchment for what had felt like hours before dozing off peacefully from Professor Trelawney's myriad of rueful predictions.

As if summoned by his thoughts, the Divination Professor materialised at their table in a flourish of shawls and beads. "Your dreams, dear," the lofty voice of the esteemed glittering insect of a teacher said, peering into his green eyes with her bizarrely magnified ones. "I was sifting through your dream diary this morning when I discovered an _unusual_ pattern among your imaginative nightly inspirations," she exclaimed importantly. Harry briefly registered that Parvati and Lavender were glaring at him from their seats near Trelawney's winged armchair while Dean and Seamus were shaking from poorly disguised snickers and nodded tardily.

"Yeah, my dreams," he mumbled vaguely at the Trelawney's questioning expression. "I was just er- dreaming about them." More so to avoid her eerie gaze than anything, Harry dropped his quill and bent down to search for it, hoping she'd be off cornering someone else when he re-emerged. He waited a minute before resurfacing and to his relief, she was, for Neville Longbottom was stuttering nervously as the self-proclaimed Seer read his dream diary and informed the boy of forthcoming doom.

"You okay, Harry?" Ron asked.

"Yeah, fell asleep is all," Harry replied. Ron looked unconvinced. "Don't worry, I'm fine, no strange dreams," he reassured, deciding to change the topic before Ron could worry anymore about his well-being. "What did Trelawney say about them?" he inquired. Ron snorted.

"You know as well as I do that we made them all up."

Harry grinned. In an attempt to stop Trelawney's morose vaticinations of his untimely and torturous death, he'd procured the dullest and most normal dreams it was possible to have, most of them involving him eating porridge in the Great Hall or reading recipe books in the Gryffindor common room.

"I dunno how, but she still managed to predict your death five times," Ron told him.

"Miserable old bat," Harry sighed.

"Maybe next time you can go overboard?" Ron suggested. Harry raised an eyebrow at him.

"You know, fill the diary with so much misery and destruction that she'll be confused about whether you'll die from starvation or get stabbed to death."

Harry smirked. "Good idea. It'll be quicker too," he said, puncturing holes in the corner of his parchment with a Falcon-feather quill. He passed the sheaf over to Ron. "Hangman?" He prompted. Ron shrugged in reply. The rest of the class slowly ticked away in this fashion; they would shuffle the parchment across the table and cross letters off in one corner, occasionally pausing to think. Professor Trelawney had set them to finding the meaning of their work partner's most recent dreams, so Harry and Ron pretended to take notes as she whiled away loudly about the importance of "nocturnal visions" in predicting the unpredictable.

"Give me a hint," Ron silently handed the parchment to Harry, scratching his head with the point of his quill, tired from a particularly exhausting round of struggling for his stick-figure's life.

"Alright," Harry breathed the word out, sketching a tiny broomstick on the last page of _The Dream Oracle_. 'Eureka!' he scribbled above where Ron's unfortunate stick-man hung precariously over the gallows.

"What?" Ron exhaled, dumbfounded. "Sounds like some ancient Latin swearword," he complained.

"You haven't heard the story?" Harry asked, surprised at this tidbit of information. Ever since he'd entered the wizarding world, there had been very few things that were brought up of which he'd known but Ron hadn't.

"Which story?" Ron questioned, a note of curiosity in his voice.

"You know, that one where this Greek mathematician was trying to figure something out," Harry started, suddenly unsure of what he was saying. He was pretty sure Archimedes had _not_ been mulling things over in the bath when he'd made the discovery. "Anyway, popular belief has it that he was thinking in the bath when he jumped out all of a sudden, ran outside, and yelled-"

"Eureka?" Ron finished for him.

"Yeah," Harry nodded.

"Poor bloke."

"He did make a pretty important discovery though. Ring a bell yet?"

"No," Ron paused. "What's his name start with?"

"A."

He jotted the letter down. Harry stretched and smiled broadly as the gears turned audibly in his friend's head, his face scrunched in concentration. He was about to ask Ron if he'd given up yet when something else caught his attention instead. Trelawney had stopped her harangue of depressing predictions and run to the front of the class. She pored over a thick book for a second before raising her arms in triumph and yelling, "ARCHIMEDES!" The class jumped. Harry froze, wondering what had possessed her. Had she known about their game all along or had the Inner Eye received a bout of inspiration and informed her?

He snatched the parchment from Ron ("Hey!") and pointed his wand at it, focusing as hard as he could, and whispered, "_Evanesco!_" The parchment vanished. Ron gaped at him.

"What did you do that for? I was 4 letters away!" He whisper-yelled as the class returned to their task of dream interpretation and Trelawney slumped in her seat, speed-drinking from a pink cup of scalding tea. She let out a hissy squeal as some of it fell in her lap.

"Trelawney just yelled the answer, Ron," Harry countered, strongly resisting the urge to call him thick-headed since he himself had no clue what the actual story was. "If she finds out, and I reckon she did, we'll both end up in detention."

"Wait, but we're not in detention. How did she know the answer?"

"Dunno. Maybe her Inner Eye got sick of her oblivion and tried to tell her."

"Or she just pulled it out of her-" Ron trailed off. Harry raised his eyebrows, silently daring him. There was a heavy silence as they stared at each other, Ron's ears turning redder by the moment.

Finally, he sighed in quiet admittance.

"Four years of being best mates with Hermione Granger does that to a person," he muttered defeatedly.

"You're not wrong," Harry agreed, unable to stop the smile spreading across his face even though Professor Trelawney was eyeing their table suspiciously.

"The old bat's looking at us. Come up with something, quick," he warned.

"Okay," Ron began as Trelawney made a show of upturning her now drained teacup on its saucer and getting off her chair. "I was falling asleep in Potions."

"Are you sure that's just a dream?" Harry inquired.

"Yes, because it gets better this time."

"Go on."

"And then Snape saw and yelled me awake, greasy git that he is."

"That's too realistic, Ron," Harry informed him, jotting it down anyway.

"Let me finish first."

"Right."

"So I raised my wand, swished it in his face, and Vanished him."

"Seriously?"

"Yep."

"Good," Harry wrote down the dream, not bothering to check whether Vanishing a person was even possible before concluding that Ronald Weasley would die a rather unfortunate death at the hands of a certain Potions Master. He hoped the morbid tone would be satisfactory enough for Trelawney as the Seer practically leaped beside their table and began analysing their work, much to Ron's dismay. The class sniggered when Trelawney reached the part where Ron promptly Vanished the Head of Slytherin house and outright laughed at Harry's interpretation of it. Even Parvati and Lavender managed to smile as they all headed down the silver ladder and out of the shadowy classroom when the bell signalling the end of class rang.

"I'm surprised she didn't kill us with homework," Ron said as he jumped the last step and the ladder folded up.

"Maybe she's hoping Snape will actually end up killing you, seeing as we have Double Potions next," Harry replied as they both descended the many steps spiralling down North Tower, remembering the cross look on Trelawney's face when she'd finished reading his interpretation of Ron's dream. She hadn't been able to criticise it however, and Harry suspected that that had been because their assignment had, eventually, resulted in someone suffering a slow and painful demise.

"Can't I have one peaceful, untarnished day here?" Ron groaned, ducking under an extra long-chained chandelier over the staircase.

"Nah," Harry said, not knowing then just how right he was. It would be years before the two would have another peaceful, unblemished day of school, but wasn't that the quirk of going to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry? Surviving danger and mystery was as much part of the school curriculum as making teacups walk and levitating objects was. After all, what was life without a little risk?

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End file.
